An announcement by Gordon Gaballe, board chairman of the Elm City festival, praised Aleskie’s “remarkable tenure at Arts & Ideas” which included “fierce advocacy for New Haven as a world-class destination for arts lovers locally, nationally and internationally.”

A news release said an executive director search committee will be appointed in January “and will oversee the hiring of an international search firm to support its efforts. In the interim, the festival will be co-directed by the festival’s Managing Director Liz Fisher, Director of Development Tom Griggs and Director of Programming Chad Herzog.”

That doesn’t mean Aleskie will be leaving New Haven as the new year dawns, however.

“I’m here through the spring,” Aleskie said in a phone interview Monday. “So I have every intention of helping to plan out the rest of this year and put some things in place for the following year and help the transition team. ... So I’m not running out the door under any circumstances.”

She said she’ll be on the job here for the festival’s Visionary Leadership Award ceremony in January and through the season announcement in late March.

“So, (you’re) not getting rid of me that fast, and who the heck moves to the middle of Hanover in the middle of January anyway?” she joked.

A Dartmouth release noted that the New Haven festival “has been cited by the National Endowment for the Arts as one of the top five arts presentations in the nation. It is considered the largest international multi-disciplinary festival in New England, and one of the only festivals in North America that blend performances from around the world with dialogues among leading thinkers.”

Aleskie said, “I’m really excited to leave the festival in a really good place, and I’m really excited for the adventures ahead.”

Arts & Ideas was established in 1996, by Anne Tyler Calabresi, Jean M. Handley and Roslyn Meyer, who envisioned a festival in historic New Haven distinguished from other arts fests by its fusion of the arts with events centered on sharing ideas. Aleskie has broadened that concept with educational outreach to local youth, college collaborations and community pop-up festivals.

“We have done a lot of great work over these 11 years. The festival is known on the world stage; we have really important relationships with major companies ... and major festivals around the world. We’ve been able to deepen our relationships in this community,” said Aleskie, who is married to theater and opera director Peter Webster and has a 16-year-old daughter.

“I’m so proud of the work that has happened with our fellows program (started in 2009, for high schoolers), our pop-ups and truly providing a voice for young people at our festival in a more consistent way.”

The festival has had a close relationship not only with Yale University but also other area colleges, including Quinnipiac University, whose economic impact study put the 2016 total at $15.4 million for the area (a 23 percent jump from the previous year).

Aleskie said that just last week, the festival firmed up a Fellowship Program collaboration with Gateway Community College on a for-credit internship for high schoolers who participate (part of the city’s Middle College program). The festival has had some 70 teens as interns in recent years.

“Our roots are really deep and wildly interwoven throughout this community, and I think that’s been a huge, huge achievement,” Aleskie said, It also helps reach out to international artists through such local groups as the Yale China Association.

The festival under Aleskie has also pushed for visibility beyond the “dramatic arc” of the 15-day festival, working with an arts collaborator during October’s City-Wide Open Studios, giving its Visionary Award at a popular January luncheon and bringing in the National Theater of Scotland’s encore of “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart” (now doing well in New York) in March, ahead of the June A&I premiere of the company’s irreverent “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour.”

The challenge for the festival, she said, is to keep doing great work and to keep attracting the resources needed to continue that work. The $3.3 million cost of the 2016 festival was largely funded by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, followed by the city’s multidimensional support, Yale, corporate sponsors, the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven and the National Endowment for the Arts, which boosts A&I prestige as a top NEA presenter.

Aleskie’s funding argument? The $15 million-plus generated during the festival period alone, along with having the largest-so-far group of folks in 2016 come in from outside the state to attend and A&I’s role invigorating the early summer here as it gives the economy a boost.

“As the state is making some hard decisions about its future, it should really think about not cutting its nose off to spite its face when it’s got assets like this really generating great opportunities for everyone,” she said.

As for Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center, aka “The Hop,” which has three theaters in one center and hosts some of the same arts acts as A&I, it’s a great fit because college leadership is committed to putting creativity and art “at the center of all living and learning,” Aleskie said — connecting the performing arts to all kinds of disciplines and “embedding a value for arts and culture in the next generation of leaders.”